Goverment-Funded Study Concludes That Education Is Bad For The Environment
Because when people get an education, find success in their careers and make money they tend to consume more energy and natural resources. And that, of course, is bad.
This passage is taken from the Education for Sustainable Development Toolkit, which was written by Dr. Rosalyn McKeown of the University of Tennessee:
Generally, more highly educated people, who have higher incomes, consume more resources than poorly educated people, who tend to have lower incomes. In this case, more education increases the threat to sustainability. . . .
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Statistical Yearbook and World Education Report, for example, show that in the United States more than 80 percent of the population has some post-secondary education, and about 25 percent of the population has a four-year degree from a university. Statistics also show that per-capita energy use and waste generation in the United States are nearly the highest in the world. In the case of the United States, more education has not led to sustainability. Clearly, simply educating citizenry to higher levels is not sufficient for creating sustainable societies. The challenge is to raise the education levels without creating an ever-growing demand for resources and consumer goods and the accompanying production of pollutants.
So, in summary, we should be trying to find out how to educate people without letting them become affluent and thus wanting creature comforts like nice cars, large homes, electronic gadgets, etc. All for the sake of cutting back on pollution. Sound…rather Orwellian? It is. And notice that there’s no mention of finding ways to provide “consumer goods” that cause less pollution. Only mention of reducing demand for those consumer goods. Because I guess that’s the role of government. To keep us from wanting things.
Dr. McKeown’s work on this “toolkit,” per the North Dakota Policy Council, was made possible by the Waste Management Resource and Education Institute, an organization that receives 78.5% of its funding from the US Department of Education, the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Meaning the funding for this nonsense about keeping people poor and uneducated for the sake of the environment (or, at the very least, making people want less stuff) came out of your wallets.
As I’ve been saying for a while now, global warming for many isn’t so much about actually protecting the environment as it’s about a desire to control every aspect of your life. If “pollution” can be used as an excuse to keep you from getting that new SUV you want, or from buying that new Blackberry you’ve had your eye on, these big-government liberals who are pushing environmentalism are going to do it. Because what they really want is power.
